I left Covent Garden last night with one question weighing on my mind: ‘What’s the difference between an opera and a musical?’ As both forms of music theatre increasingly draw their themes from contemporary life, as composers dip more frequently into the musical language of the world around them, as stage directors employ ever-more astounding stage imagery the traditional distinctions become unclear. Of course, a second question also shapes itself: ‘Does it really matter?’
 


Anna Nicole, to music by Mark-Anthony Turnage and a libretto by Richard Thomas, is a terrific evening in the theatre. It’s brassy, it's blowzy, it’s obscene, it’s startling, it’s touching, it’s moving and it's very funny. Gone is the visceral edge of the younger Turnage (of Greek certainly, but even the later The Silver Tassie), and in its place is a lyricism of at times heart-aching beauty, but some of the dramatic bite seems to have gone too. The First Act passes with little to latch onto musically, and only one number (Anna Nicole’s aria after she returns to her lap-dancing club with her spectacularly enhanced bosom) that really makes one sit up and listen to the music.



The story traces the American Dream, through its silicone-assisted ascent to its drug-and-booze-fuelled descent, from near-poverty in Texas to untold wealth thanks to her marriage to the billionaire J Howard Marshall II (63 years her senior) and then back again, on the biggest downer of them all. Peter Conrad, in a typically astute article for The Observer, excerpted in the Covent Garden programme, put it perfectly: Anna Nicole “was the perfect celebrity, sustained by effrontery and unblessed by talent”. I suspect that both Turnage and Thomas have grown quite fond of her: there’s little of the preposterous, jaw-dropping egotism that made her into a national laughing-stock, if not a freak show. In the opera she’s seen largely as a pawn – a ditzy dumb blonde with a penchant for Disney-esque cartoon animals and baby-talk – who’s manipulated by the people around her (notably the oleaginous lawyer Stern with whom she lives after Marshall’s death).

Richard Jones’s production is glorious – imaginative, visually astounding and wonderfully crafted for Covent Garden’s wide stage.
 
Eva-Maria Westbroek, Dutch but completely inside her Texan accent, gives a fearless and beautifully rounded (!) characterisation that encompasses the huge arc of Anna Nicole’s trajectory. She plays the first part in her underwear, the centre panel accessorised with her prosthetic double-F bosom and finally supersized (very convincingly) in her trailer-trash T and trousers. But above all she’s deeply human and the scene where she’s forced to play out her pregnancy to the ever-present cameras is heart-breaking. And the highly dubious charade surrounding the death of her teenage son is kept suitably ambiguous – the litany of drugs sung from his body bag by Daniel (Dominic Rowntree) is numbing.

Gerald Finley is characteristically superb as the lawyer Stern: manipulative, cruel and heartless, but the role doesn't give him much to get his teeth into or allow him to develop the character. Alan Oke as Marshall not only sings with a twinkle in his eye, with some great lines (“There no such thing as a free ranch”), but absolutely acts the part (his entry on an outsize stair-lift is a masterstroke). Antonio Pappano conducts with a palpable love for the score, drawing crack playing from his orchestra: hardly the sort of music that makes up their daily diet. 
 


The music, enjoyable but slightly lacking in pungency in the First Act, steps up a notch in the Second, and the little interlude that opens the act seems to mine a richer level of creativity – it’s just a shame it’s so short. It’s tempting to conclude that Turnage is inspired more by pain and suffering than by yearning or happiness (however fleeting). His choruses, though, are terrific and Richard Thomas’s words – often spectacularly obscene – power the work along. I can’t imagine Susan Bickley’s first reaction to her score when preparing the part of Anna Nicole’s sassy mother Virgie – but she gives a fearless performance. (Interestingly, the more outrageous the words the more laughter emerged from the women of a certain age sitting around me in the stalls alongside their clearly more restrained husbands. It’s hard to imagine the work getting an outing in the US given the language: the 'c-word' is about the least offensive bit of vocab on the night.) 
 


Whether it’s a contemporary opera or a sophisticated musical, Anna Nicole has seduced London from beyond the grave – and she’d have loved the over-the-top setting of Covent Garden’s auditorium with its red and gold, though she would probably have had plastic covers fitted over the seats to keep them fresh and perty.